Cubism is the art of depicting new wholes with formal elements borrowed not only from the reality of vision, but from that of conception. — Guillaume Apollinaire
Cubism is like standing at a certain point on a mountain and looking around. If you go higher, things will look different; if you go lower, again they will look different. It is a point of view. — Jacques Lipchitz
As a movement Cubism had consistently stopped short of complete abstraction. Heretics such as Delaunay had painted pure abstractions but in so doing had deserted Cubism. — Alfred H. Barr, Jr.
Cubism is not a reality you can take in your hand. It's more like a perfume, in front of you, behind you, to the sides, the scent is everywhere but you don’t quite know where it comes from. — Pablo Picasso
When we discovered cubism, we did not have the aim of discovering cubism. We only wanted to express what was in us. — Pablo Picasso
abstract art is not the creation of another reality but the true vision of reality. — Piet Mondrian
The truly modern artist is aware of abstraction in an emotion of beauty. — Piet Mondrian
Malevitch discovered abstraction as an experimental principle that can propel creative work to previously unheard levels of invention; this abstract work allowed much greater levels of creativity. — Zaha Hadid
While the expressive possibilities of Neoplasticism are limited to two dimensions (the plane), Elementarism realizes the possibility of plasticism in four dimensions, in the field of time-space. — Theo van Doesburg
Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. — Jackson Pollock
The painter thinks in terms of form and color. The goal is not to be concerned with the reconstitution of an anecdotal fact, but with constitution of a pictorial fact. — Georges Braque
The symbol of all art is the Prism. The goal is unrealism. The method is destructive. To break up the white light of objective realism, into the secret glories which it contains. — E. E. cummings
Most people don't do something seminal. I've done it twice: with my tent and my bed. Picasso did it with Cubism. — Tracey Emin
The modern artist is working with space and time, and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating. — Jackson Pollock
What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism. — Octavio Paz
Short Cubism Quotes
People want to find a 'meaning' in everything and everyone. That's the disease of our age... — Pablo Picasso
I don't say everything, but I paint everything. — Pablo Picasso
Seeing Cubism paintings at the Beaubourg makes me very happy and also old films. — Yves Saint Laurent
Maybe Cubism started this way. Memory re-arranging a face. — Mary Rakow
I happen to like Precisionism. It talks to me because I collect Cubism. — Leonard Lauder
Cubism ('multi-locationalism') is one of the painterly forms of acoustic space. — Marshall McLuhan
Abstract Expressionism Quotes
Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is. — Jackson Pollock
Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn't have any beginning or any end. He didn't mean it as a compliment, but it was. — Jackson Pollock
I was a student at Harvard, and that's where I learned about so-called avant-garde music. Jackson Pollock, abstract expressionism and painting were well known at this time. — Henry Flynt
I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism. — Don Delillo
Abstract Expressionism - the first American movement to have a worldwide influence - was remarkably short-lived: It heated up after World War II and was all but done for by 1960 (although visit any art school today and you'll find a would-be Willem de Kooning). — Jerry Saltz
The big shock of my life was Abstract Expressionism - Pollock, de Kooning, those guys. It changed my work. I was an academically trained student, and suddenly you could pour paint, smear it on, broom it on! — LeRoy Neiman
I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. — Jackson Pollock
But no one, when you stop to think, has ever equated abstract expressionism as a movement with jazz music. It's based on improvisation. The rhythms, the personal involvement, all of this is part of the jazz experience. — Romare Bearden
The modern artist... is working and expressing an inner world - in other words - expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces. — Jackson Pollock
Surrealism Quotes
My idea is to bring happiness, respect, vision, poetry, surrealism and magic [to design]. — Philippe Starck
Surrealism had a great effect on me because then I realised that the imagery in my mind wasn't insanity. Surrealism to me is reality. — John Lennon
I maintain that anyone who still refuses to see, for instance, a horse galloping on a tomato, must be an idiot. A tomato is also a child's balloon - Surrealism, again, having suppressed the word "like." — Andre Breton
Surrealism is based on the belief in the omnipotence of dreams, in the undirected play of thought. — Andre Breton
Surrealism in painting amounted to little more than the contents of a meagerly stocked dream world: a few witty fantasies, mostly wet dreams and agoraphobic nightmares. — Susan Sontag
Life is all there is. And if that’s true, then we have to really live it — we have to take it for everything it has and ‘die enormous’ instead of ‘living dormant.’ — Jay-Z
I love basketball so much, I love playing it. I just never thought I could make it to college, make it to the NBA or stand up here today in front of you guys and be an NBA MVP. It’s just a surreal feeling, and I had so much help, so many people believe in me when I didn’t believe in myself. — Kevin Durant
A painting is never finished — it simply stops in interesting places. — Dan Sullivan
One of the most surreal moments in this election was after the third debate, when I heard a talking head say, Al Gore won on substance, on the issues. But you have to give the victory to Bush because he seems presidential. — Bradley Whitford
Abstract Art Quotes
The drawings don't start with 'a beautiful mark'. It has to be a mark of something out there in the world. It doesn't have to be an accurate drawing, but it has to stand for an observation, not something that is abstract, like an emotion. — William Kentridge
Of all the arts, abstract painting is the most difficult. It demands that you know how to draw well, that you have a heightened sensitivity for composition and for colors, and that you be a true poet. This last is essential. — Wassily Kandinsky
There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality. — Pablo Picasso
Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional. It has no power to represent anything particular or external, but it has a unique power to express inner states or feelings. Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation. — Oliver Sacks
Why must art be static? You look at an abstraction, sculptured or painted, an entirely exciting arrangement of planes, spheres, nuclei, entirely without meaning. It would be perfect but it is always still. The next step in sculpture is motion. — Alexander Calder
The works of 'abstract' art are subtle creations of order out of simple contrasting elements. — Jan Tschichold
The buttocks are the most aesthetically pleasing part of the body because they are non-functional. Although they conceal an essential orifice, these pointless globes are as near as the human form can ever come to abstract art. — Kenneth Tynan
We speak of concrete and not abstract painting because nothing is more concrete, more real than a line, a color, a surface. — Theo van Doesburg
The pop artists did images that anybody walking down Broadway could recognize in a split second — comics, picnic tables, men’s trousers, celebrities, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coke bottles. All the great modern things that the Abstract Expressionists tried not to notice at all. — Andy Warhol
Impressionism Quotes
To my mind, a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful, and pretty, yes pretty! There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is without creating still more of them. — Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Impressionism is the newspaper of the soul. — Henri Matisse
Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life. — Muriel Spark
There is a young and impressionable mind out there that is hungry for information. It has latched on to an electronic tube as its main source of nourishment. — Joan Ganz Cooney
The writers who have the deepest influence on one are those one reads in ones more impressionable, early life, and often it is the more youthful works of those writers that leave the deepest imprint. — J. M. Coetzee
The most authentic Russian Impressionism leaves one perplexed if one compares it with Monet and Pissarro. Here, in the Louvre, before the canvases of Manet, Millet and others, I understood why my alliance with Russia and Russian art did not take root. — Marc Chagall
Art, to me, is the interpretation of the impression which nature makes upon the eye and brain. — Childe Hassam
One morning, one of us ran out of the black, it was the birth of Impressionism. — Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Impressionism means taking inspiration directly from nature, trusting your senses rather than what you think you know. — Michael McClure
For children in their most impressionable years, there is, in fantasy, the highest of stimulating and educational powers. — Arthur Rackham
Every so often, a painter has to destroy painting. Cezanne did it, Picasso did it with Cubism. Then Pollock did it. He busted our idea of a picture all to hell. Then there could be new paintings again. — Willem de Kooning
Cubism is not a manner but an aesthetic, and even a state of mind; it is therefore inevitably connected with every manifestation of contemporary thought. It is possible to invent a technique or a manner independently, but one cannot invent the whole complexity of a state of mind. — Juan Gris
What greatly attracted me - and it was the main line of advance of Cubism - was how to give material expression to this new space of which I had an inkling. So I began to paint chiefly still lifes, because in nature there is a tactile, I would almost say a manual space... that was the earliest Cubist painting - the quest for space. — Georges Braque
As we do not see squares in nature, I thought that it is man-made. But I have corrected myself. Because squares exist in salt crystals, our daily salt. — Josef Albers
Cubism came about because, in the process of analyzing form, something that lay in the form, a plane, could be lifted out to float on its own. — Joseph Plaskett
Cubism did not accept the logical consequences of its own discoveries; it was not developing abstraction towards its own goal, the expression of pure reality. — Piet Mondrian
The goal I proposed myself in making cubism? To paint and nothing more... with a method linked only to my thought... Neither the good nor the true; neither the useful nor the useless. — Pablo Picasso
If we had never met Picasso, would Cubism have been what it is? I think not. The meeting with Picasso was a circumstance in our lives. — Georges Braque
No high-minded painter of the last fifty years has been able to come to terms with his art without coming to terms with the problem of cubism. — Walter Darby Bannard
I think music has gone through a period of something very severe, rather radical, rather the way painting did with cubism. — Harrison Birtwistle
If I have called Cubism a new order, it is without any revolutionary ideas or any reactionary ideas... One cannot escape from one's own epoch, however revolutionary one may be. — Georges Braque
Until cubism, all art, all pictures, could be 'read' by anybody. If this hadn't been so, the Christian message wouldn't have been seen by peasants and its importance would have been diminished. — David Hockney
The non-geometric biomorphic forms of Arp and Miro and Moore are definitely in the ascendant. The formal tradition of Gauguin, Fauvism and Expressionism will probably dominate for some time to come the tradition of Cezanne and Cubism. — Alfred H. Barr, Jr.
Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration. — Octavio Paz
The activities of these parasites and degenerates gave rise to Cubism, Fauvism, Futurism, Pointillism, Constructivism, Orphism, Surrealism, Dada, and also Impossibleism, Supersurrealism, Dynamic Double-Dog Realism, Ishkabibbleism, and Mama, which is like Dada only nicer. — Daniel Pinkwater
There has been 32 isms since the advent of cubism, yet after all there are essentially the same two old strings, the Romantic and the Classical. We've just be confused by the storm. Science and psychology have played a great part to say nothing of sex. — Mark Tobey
The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities, in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists, reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai. — J. G. Ballard
Cubism is an anatomical chart of a way of seeing external objects. But I want to confuse the meaning of the act of looking. — Jasper Johns
As a visual arts teacher, I have to keep my mind open. I have explores styles from pointillism to cubism. — St. Lucia
City of prose and fantasy, of capitalist automation, its streets a triumph of cubism, its moral philosophy that of the dollar. New York impressed me tremendously because, more than any other city, it is the fullest expression of our modern age. — Leon Trotsky
Cubism is ... a picture for its own sake.
Literary Cubism does the same thing in literature, using reality merely as a means and not as an end. — Max Jacob
I was trained to look at colour, edges, to see negative space. I honestly think my greatest influence as a writer is from Cubism - the idea of a multi-faceted, multi-perspective way of looking at things. — Rebecca Miller
Raising a child is a little like Picasso's work; in the beginning he did very conventional representational things. Cubism came after he had the rules down pat. — Anna Quindlen
Cubism is still the most important art movement for the same reason that John D. is still the most important Rockefeller. — Brad Holland
Modernism in a way, early modernism, for instance, in pictures, was turning against perspective and Europe. And all early modernism is actually from out of Europe, when you think of cubism is African, is looking at Africa, Matisse is looking at the arabesque, Oceania. Europe was the optical projection that had become photography, that had become film, that became television and it conquered the world. — David Hockney
Cubism is fascinating to me. I love trying to figure it out. It's just a different way of seeing... I think there are many avenues that haven't been explored yet. — Robert Lyn Nelson
The fact that for a long time Cubism has not been understood and that even today there are people who cannot see anything in it means nothing. I do not read English, an English book is a blank book to me. This does not mean that the English language does not exist. Why should I blame anyone but myself if I cannot understand what I know nothing about?" -Pablo Picasso. — Pablo Picasso
In Conclusion
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